The Backpacker (5 page)

ONE

Paddy-fields, paddy-fields and more bloody paddy-fields: that's all I could see as I cleared the Bay of Bengal on the way to Bangkok. Flooded land that reflected the early evening sky beautifully; each waterlogged paddy a mirror separated from the next by a thin embankment, so that from the air it looked like one huge stained-glass window.

When I touched down in Bangkok I pondered the difference between air and land travel. Having seen those paddy-fields from the air and expected a city of bamboo houses built along picturesque canals, I thought I'd stepped out of the airport into some kind of time warp. Concrete, concrete and more bloody concrete.

After numerous cups of coffee and a packet of cigarettes in the tiny airport café, I plucked up the courage to venture out into the now dark, humid car park, and stood at the bus stop. I closed my eyes and imagined I was waiting for a canal-boat taxi to ferry me into town.

‘You going downtown, man?'

I snapped my eyes open and turned around, for some reason shocked to hear English being spoken. A young man with a backpack and an acoustic guitar strapped on top was standing inches away from me. ‘Yeah,' I said, stepping back.

He turned around, gave an ear-splitting whistle, and then cupped both hands around his mouth to shout. ‘Hey, Sooze, over here! It's this bus stop, babe!'

A girl came jogging over, finishing in a little two-footed jump to land beside us. The man did one loud clap and turned back to me. ‘This here's Suzy-Sue. Hey, you British?'

‘English,' I said, wondering why Americans always refer to the nation and not the country, ‘yeah.'

‘There you go, Sooze, one o' your lot. Told you we'd find someone who knew this place.'

Knew the place! I'd only just stepped off the plane and they thought I was someone they could trust! Before I could explain, he pulled out a packet of cigarettes and offered them to me, along with his hand to shake: cigarettes first, then hand. ‘Dave,' he said.

‘John,' I took a cigarette. ‘Thanks.'

‘Hey, John, what's up? You look a leetle glum.'

‘Do I?' I was genuinely surprised to hear it at first, but then remembered that I wasn't waiting for a canal taxi. ‘Yeah, I suppose I do really. Just came from India and–'

‘India? Whoo-ee!' He did a three-sixty degree spin and came to a stop, his cigarette poised in one hand, zippo in the other. He lit up and said, ‘India? That's fuckin' Wild West country over there. I had a friend once, went to India,' he moved close to me, shaking his head, ‘never returned!' He looked over his shoulder quickly as though about to spill a secret. ‘They found him two years later living in a fuckin' cave! Living off snakes and rats and shit. Man, I tell ya,' he lit the zippo and held it above his head like the Statue of Liberty, ‘count me outta that crap. Yes siree.' Suzy was standing behind him making a clap-trap movement with her hand, indicating that he talked too much.

The bus pulled up a few minutes later, sparing me from further lectures, and when we boarded it was so crowded that we were unable to sit near each other. Throughout the whole journey, however, I could still hear Dave's American ‘whoops' and ‘damns' like he was riding a horse in a rodeo. Suzy seemed to have nodded off but he just kept talking all the same, going from one subject to another without any common thread to join them together, or any real point to what he was saying.

‘Hey, John!

I flicked my head to him and his hand shot up as if I needed visual help to locate his position on an otherwise silent bus.

‘Where you headed? Suzy an' me, we're going to–' he ducked down, apparently checking something, and after a second his head reappeared, ‘Khao San Road. How about yourself?'

I checked a piece of paper I'd scribbled an address on and looked up. ‘Banglamphu.'

Dave's neck extended above the headrest in surprise before it shot back down to check the name I'd given him. A moment later he raised a hand, giving an OK sign.

The bus journey took hours. What I'd taken to be a thirty-minute ride was turning into an epic, and after an hour and a half of traffic snarl-ups the bus broke down. It seemed like India all over again. For some reason the radiator cap on Bangkok buses is on the inside so when they overheat, as ours did, and the driver unscrewed it, Mount Vesuvius erupted sending a cloud of steam down the aisle. Panic-stricken, the entire occupants of the bus bolted for the door causing a bottleneck of frantic, writhing bodies that eventually spilled out onto the pavement.

‘Not a good start, huh?' I said, sitting on my bag at the side of the road.

Suzy put her bag down and sat on the kerb next to me. ‘What a night,' she huffed, and offered me a stick of chewing gum. ‘What time is it, Dave?'

Dave was dancing around the bus catching raindrops in his upturned palms and rubbing them into his face. He looked at his watch. ‘Midnight – BKT. Woo-hoo!'

I frowned at Suzy. ‘BKT?'

‘Big Kok Time. Calls Bangkok the Big Kok,' and added by way of an explanation, ‘He's from New York.'

I paused, unwrapping the gum, and said, ‘You two together?'

‘Um, not really, just happened to get talking on the plane that's all. You're alone, right?'

‘Yep, just me and my bag.'

‘Cool.' She fiddled with the strap of her boots before continuing. ‘Not going to Khao San Road with the rest of the hoards then? What's the name of that place you said earlier, Bang–?'

‘Banglamphu. I don't know anything about it, just a tip-off.'

‘Don't you have a guidebook?'

I shook my head and smiled.

After a two-hour wait in which we got drenched to the bone sitting at the roadside discussing our travel plans, Dave catching rain on his tongue, another bus finally pulled up and we boarded. ‘Listen John,' Suzy whispered to me as I turned up the aisle towards the only empty seat, ‘I'm only staying here a couple of days and then heading south to the islands. We can go together.'

I shrugged. ‘All right. We're bound to bump into each other over the next few days, so I'll speak to you then.' I walked away and she went down to join Dave at the front of the bus.

Had I known that Banglamphu was at one end of Khao San Road I wouldn't have said that we would bump into each other. I wanted to see Bangkok and go south alone. So when the driver stopped the bus an hour later and said that we were at Khao San Road
and
Banglamphu, I pretended that I knew where I was and told him to go on. Dave and Suzy got off and I stayed, alighting at the following stop.

The bus pulled away in a cloud of black smoke and I stood, taking in the scene around me for a minute, before slinging the bag over my shoulder and moving off to find a guest house. The rain that had soaked me earlier had turned into a light drizzle, not too much to make me wet through but steady enough to cool the tropical night. Everything was reflected in the puddles and glistening pavements: the shop windows, neon signs, even the car headlights that flashed intermittently in the pot holes like a giant blinking cat's eyes.

After walking the length of two streets and being turned away from at least a dozen guest houses, I began to feel exhausted. A wave of tiredness suddenly hit me along with the fear that I was going to have to spend a night walking the streets, so I decided to sit on a shop window sill to consider my next move. A growling noise caused me to jump up. The shabby looking dog didn't like me sitting in his spot so I moved wearily on, turned the next corner and stopped.

‘Grrr!'

I looked behind. Shit, it was following me. Slowly and calmly I walked on, afraid to look back, but whenever I did I noticed that the dog was still there, about ten paces behind me. Every time I stopped he stopped and bared his teeth menacingly, growling. When I crossed the road he crossed, every street I walked down he followed, and every time I stood still he did exactly the same thing, stopping ten paces behind and sneering. The dog was so fierce-looking that I didn't even have the guts to shoo it away.

I went into numerous guest houses, some of which I'd already tried, and every time I came out the dog was still there, waiting and growling. All of the accommodation was full, so eventually, to get away from the dog, I jumped into a tuk-tuk to the other end of the street; a 500-yard journey that the driver ripped me off fiercely for, but it was worth it just to be out of biting range.

I was so tired by this time that I couldn't be bothered to get my watch out of my bag to check the time, and had to ask a passerby. The traveller with tattooed arms told me to fuck off. I sank. Any more of this, I thought, and I'll get on the next train south and give Bangkok a miss altogether. What had I done to him? I watched as he walked down the road to see if he had the excuse of being drunk, but he wasn't. Perhaps he'd had a bad night and got ripped off in Patpong.

Having run out of places to stay, and unable to stand any longer, I threw my bag down in a shop doorway and lay down, using my only jumper as a pillow. I think I must have blinked twice before the weight of my eyelids, too great to lift, pulled shut and I drifted off.

I wasn't sure if I had woken up or not. My head rolled from side to side and I jumped a lot – sleep jumps; the ones where you're not quite asleep but you can't wake up – and something was tugging at my foot. Again I rolled my head from side to side, my neck sticking to my shoulder with sweat, and opened my heavy, baggy eyes just as a sharp pain shot up my toes and into my foot. I quickly withdrew my leg and blinked the mist from my eyes before screaming. A tie-dye pig! My foot! I pulled both feet up to my buttocks but the pig came nearer, so I quickly stood up, going dizzy with the sudden draining of blood from my head.

The pig snorted around for a second or two before a Westerner, also dressed in tie-dye, grabbed the piece of string that was tied around the animal's neck and led it away like a pet dog.

I crouched and put my head in my hands. ‘Oh God, this can't be happening.' My eyes felt like they were burning and I rubbed them hard before looking up to see whether I was dreaming or not. I wasn't. There was a crowd of revellers on the opposite side of the road trying to feed a joint to the painted pig. It sniffed and then bit it in half, causing everyone to laugh and whoop, dancing crazily in a circle like Red Indians.

Coming out of the shop doorway I looked up at the sky, the clouds just about discernible in the early morning light. As I turned to pick up my bag and jumper I noticed the posters in the window: brightly coloured pictures of tropical beaches; blue skies, blue seas, white sand and lush jungle backdrops of the deepest green.
Koh Samui
, read one,
Phi Phi Island
, another. Two bikini-clad models were lying on a gleaming white yacht in one poster, and underneath the operator of the travel agency had written,
KOH PHA-NGAN DAILY BUS / TRAIN.

My soul lifted like a rocket, my eyes cleared and I took a step back to focus on the door sign.
Opening hours: 9 a.m. to 10 p.m.
it read, and, for the first time since my fiancée had left, I took out my wristwatch to check the time.

TWO

After India, train travel in Thailand was a breeze: the train was clean, each person had a separate coffin-like box to sleep in with a curtain for privacy, the carriage was air conditioned, they served beer and, above all, they ran on time. My train south was due to leave at half past six and it did, to the minute. The only drawback was the price, which was ten times the cost of an equivalent journey in India. In fact I was rapidly learning that everything was ten times more than I'd been paying the day before.

Although I wasn't running out of money yet, the cost of the flight from Calcutta to Bangkok was an unexpected burden on my budget. I had expected to have to fly but, contrary to the advice I'd received from other travellers, there were no cheap flights to be had in Calcutta, and it had cost the same for that one-way, two-hour flight as a cheap return ticket from London to New York. The cost of that ticket alone could have kept me on the road in India, all food and lodging included, for two months at least.

However, I did have a choice when leaving Bangkok to either go by train or bus. The bus was slightly cheaper, but in the end, having weighed up the situation, I chose the train. A wise choice because although the bus left earlier, getting me away from pigs and dogs, I didn't feel up to sitting in a seat for ten hours. At least on the train I could kill two birds with one stone: get there and have a good sleep.

The train pulled out of the station, and at about nine o'clock, after dinner and one beer, I zonked out, fully dressed. The sound of the other travellers around me laughing and discussing their various ports of call faded into infinity along with the sound of the train wheels, and I drifted off, cosy in the knowledge that there would be nothing to disturb me.

The next thing I knew, the guard was walking up and down the train waking everyone up for breakfast. We were transferred onto a clapped-out ferry early in the morning and I lay on deck, soaking up the magical first rays of the sun, content that I was finally, truly out of Bangkok and among blue sea and palm trees.

Little green islands were dotted around the place, coming into view and then, when each person on the boat had discussed whether or not it was their island, passing us by. I had just muttered, ‘Ahh, this is the life,' to myself and lain down on the top deck, when I heard a vaguely familiar voice above the whine of the engines shout, ‘Hey, Suzy, isn't that John over there, that British guy?'

I opened one eye. There was a pause while Dave fought his way over to me, across the bodies strewn on deck, occasionally giving a one fingered gesture to anyone who complained.

‘Well, la-di-da!' he said, standing over me, the sun eclipsed by his head. ‘Hey brother, you too huh? Me an' Sooze couldn't take it either.' He did his familiar secret agent style glance over his shoulder and crouched down beside me. ‘To tell you the truth John, heard there're some, er, babes on this island of ours. Thought I might bag me a couple. Whaddya say?'

I agreed half-heartedly before Suzy came over lugging Dave's guitar and looking thoroughly pissed off. She shoved it at him angrily as he stood up. ‘It
is
John,' she said sarcastically. ‘Well this calls for a celebration. You hang onto this while I go downstairs and buy us all a beer. How'd that be,
Dave
?'

Dave watched her storm off. ‘Whoo-ee, getting touchy aren't we?' he called after her, and, conscious of the guitar that was propped up against him, tried to make light of the incident by kissing it. ‘C'mon baby, you an me, don't need three,' and rode astride it.

We drank the beer that Suzy bought, and Dave toasted freedom and ‘La-di-da British girls' before dozing off, using his guitar as a pillow. I pretended to sleep to avoid having to talk to Suzy. She seemed nice enough but I had other things on my mind; like how long the rest of my money would last, and what I was going to do if, as I feared, Rick wasn't on the island any more.

I was still thinking about these things when we pulled into the ferry pier on Koh Pha-Ngan and transferred ourselves into one of the waiting Isuzus that took new arrivals to various parts of the island.

Dave loaded himself and his gear into the back of the pick-up and held out a hand, pulling me up. ‘Where're you heading John?'

‘Hat Rin,' I said, brushing the dust off the seat before sitting. ‘You?'

‘Same-same, bro.' He dusted a seat with Shakespearean melodrama, intended for Suzy, but she ignored it, tutting and sitting on the opposite bench to us instead.

Following a bit of negotiation we sped off up the bumpy track into the island, clouds of dust billowing around us and covering everyone except the driver, who sat in an air conditioned cab, in a fine yellow layer.

‘You, ahem, know where you're gonna stay?' Suzy asked, opening her guidebook on a map of Hat Rin, leaning across and balancing it on my knees.

I shrugged, twisting my neck to read the map that was upside-down. ‘Play it by ear.'

‘That's the spirit.' Dave snatched the book and threatened to throw it out the back of the pick-up. We suddenly hit a bump in the road and the book jumped out of his hands and tumbled out onto the track.

‘Stop!' Suzy banged on the cab window. ‘Make them stop, Dave, John!'

‘Shit.' Dave slapped the car roof with the palm of his hand, bringing us to a skidding halt. We reversed, picked up the battered guidebook and drove off again. No one talked for the rest of the journey except Dave, who kept apologising.

We must have passed at least a dozen different sets of beach bungalows as we followed the coastline intermittently across the island, each one stunningly picturesque, but nobody got out. Everyone, it appeared, was heading to Hat Rin beach, and when we finally arrived I could see why: a single crescent of gleaming white sand hemmed in by a turquoise sea. Dave and I dropped our gear on the beach as we ran down and plunged into the warm clear water.

‘Woo-hoo!' He belly-flopped like a starfish, turned over and went into a handstand. I dived and swam underwater, and swam and swam, not ever wanting to stop. My eyes opened and the world became a soft blue that was so pleasant I kept swimming until I was in about twenty-five feet of water. A turn onto my back enabled me to see the surface: a gently rippled glass ceiling through which saturated rays of sunshine pierced like a thousand torch beams. Running out of air, I stood on the bottom, did one quick three-sixty to locate the sloping beach and pushed upwards, breaking the surface with a gasp.

‘John!' Dave thumbed towards the beach where I could just make out Suzy, standing over his guitar with her arms folded across her chest in anger. ‘Gotta go, you coming?'

‘You go and find a place,' I shouted. ‘I'll catch up with you later.'

He marked the air with a forefinger and attempted a back-flip. It went wrong and he walked off up the beach rubbing his head.

Floating, that's all I wanted to do, face up and face down, forever. Or until the previous two days and two countries' worth of sweat, grime and dust had drifted silently off my body. I felt like a shirt in one of those washing powder adverts, where they have a close-up of the dirt particles lifting off the material. ‘Whiter than white,' I mumbled, looking up at the azure sky and marvelling at the single white cloud that looked like it had been stuck on, like a ball of cotton wool on a school kid's collage. ‘Bluey-white'.

I floated so long that afternoon that not only did the dirt drift off my body but so did my shorts. The constant use was more than they could stand and the stitching gave way all at once, so that I had to hold them on with both hands when I walked back up the beach. For that reason more than any real sense of bargain-hunting I booked into the first set of beach bungalows that stood on the sand, and, after a filling meal, set about the task of searching out the person I'd come here to find.

I still had the crumpled piece of paper that Rick had scribbled on when we had parted company in India, and after asking a waiter at one of the beach restaurants and being told that the Back Yard Pub was up on a hill overlooking a beach, I went on my way. I was directed down through the main street, and after five minutes was climbing a hill into the trees, with no sign of human activity. ‘Shit, this can't be right,' I muttered, and stood, sweating in the evening heat.

‘Keep going. You wan' Ba' Yar' Pu'?' A lithe young Thai man pointed further up the hill and walked off into the trees, to do whatever Thai men do in trees, and I continued.

The top of the path levelled off and swung left into a small yard, behind which was a large wooden house. A yard, I reasoned, a pub at the back of that yard. It had to be the right place. I walked up onto a wooden veranda, onto what was obviously a dance floor, and strode over to the far end, facing a jungle hillside. The whole place had a fantastic view overlooking palm trees that ran downhill to another beach. On the blue horizon was another island, lit orange by the evening sun.

‘Wha' you wan'?' I spun round, startled. The Thai man who had vanished into the trees climbed over the wooden handrail and jumped onto the veranda.

‘Umm, I'm looking for Rick,' I said, slightly unsure. ‘Is he here?'

He started to fiddle with the wiring on the sound system, seemingly ignorant of what I'd said.

I cleared my throat. ‘Excuse me, is–'

‘Li?' he said looking up. ‘You wan' Li'? No have Li' here.'

Maybe he was wrong, or maybe he hadn't understood. Pointlessly pulling the scrap of paper from my pocket, I repeated, ‘Rick. I am looking for a man called Rick. Do you have any messages for me? My name is... '

‘No have.'

I sighed and leaned against the handrail, sweat pouring off me from the combined effort of climbing the hill and asking the question. ‘Are you sure you don't have any messages?'

He went back to his fiddling. ‘Tol' you, man, no have, no have! Why you no listen?'

I deflated. It wasn't possible. I'd come so far. Partly to see other places I had to admit, but mainly to meet up with Rick. Reluctantly I walked out of the house, still wanting to ask him again but knowing that it would lead nowhere. If Rick was, or had ever been to Koh Pha-Ngan he clearly would have left a message. That was the arrangement and I felt sure that he would stick to it. He must have reached the island all those weeks ago and been persuaded, by a girl probably, to go to a different island, or up to Chiang Mai.

No longer wanting to think about where I was going to go next or what plans to make, I went back down to the beach, bought an ounce of Thai grass and crashed in my beach hut. I felt gutted and suddenly very alone.

I rolled a joint and had only smoked half before the room started to spin. I hadn't smoked for a while and the effect seemed to be double what I remembered it to be. Suddenly overcome by a queasy feeling, I lay down in an attempt to keep the room from moving. Phew! Was this strong or was I simply unaccustomed to smoking? I closed my eyes and felt worse, the room whizzed, my stomach felt woozy and I belched before running into the toilets and throwing up a barely digested green curry. ‘Fuck!' The sweat ran off my head and fell like rain, cratering the leafy green liquid. I ladled some water onto my head and the dizziness eventually cleared enough for me to go back and sit on the bed.

After half an hour, my body recovered just enough energy for me to stand and fix up my mosquito net, but it felt like such an arduous task to tie a piece of string and attach the loops that I did it incorrectly. I fell back onto the bed; one end of the net pinged off and it smothered my head like a mist. Too tired and too pissed off to bother, the sleep my body craved enveloped me like the net and I quickly drifted off.

I hadn't even noticed the scribbled message that had been stuck to the inside of my door with a Rizla.